Many people, ancient and living today, believed that most of the body’s ills comes from disharmony inside of the body. That disharmony can be achieved through bad diet, bad habits, and poor thoughts. Jin Shin Jyutsu, which is an ancient art of mending from Japan, uses certain pressure points to create harmony again in your body.

Using the image above, you can find the right fingers to put pressure on to help relieve certain symptoms in your body.

If you put pressure on the thumb

You bring harmony to your stomach and spleen. You can also relieve nervousness, anxiety and depression. You can also relieve skin problems, headaches, stomach aches, and the sensation of constantly being ill.

If you put pressure on the index or pointer finger

You bring harmony to your kidneys and bladder. You can also relieve feelings of apprehension, as well as muscle cramps, back pain, tooth aches and digestive tract problems.

If you put pressure on the middle finger

You bring harmony to your liver and nerves. You can also relieve feelings of anger and uncertainty. You also improve your cardiovascular health, menstrual pain, issues with vision, and headaches.

If you put pressure on the ring finger

You bring harmony to your lungs and digestive organs. You can also relieve feelings of distress as well as ringing in the ears, breathing problems, and digestive problems.

If you put pressure on the little finger

You bring harmony to your heart. Feelings of tension, anxiety, and loneliness are relieved. You can also improve throat pain, flatulence, and issues with your bones.

Give it a try!

http://simpleorganiclife.org/bottled-water-check/

May 12, 2015

We don’t generally encourage the purchase of bottled water. Manufacturing the bottles is awful for the environment (and we think the environment is awesome!) and the water is usually just tap water from wherever it was bottled. Often times, bottled water companies steal water in mass quantities from arid communities that live in drought. That’s no fun. That said, I do always keep a pack of bottled water in my car. You never know when you might be stranded somewhere and a little water could mean the difference between life and death. But when I’m stocking my emergency water supply, I check the label on the bottom of the bottles.

Why?

The letters you see in the recycle symbol, like PP and HDP, can tell you a lot about the plastic itself. This is what you need to know:

If the label says PET or PETE, the plastic bottles may have leaked metals and chemicals into the water that impact hormonal balance in your body.

If the label says HDP or HDPE, your water is likely the safest out of any type of plastic. it’s the least likely to leak harmful substances into your water.

Drink coffee to have a better nap

In a Japanese study that examined how to make the most of a nap, people who took a “coffee nap”—consuming about 200 milligrams of caffeine (the amount in one to two cups of coffee) and then immediately taking a 20-minute rest—felt more alert and performed better on computer tests than those who only took a nap.
Why does this work? A 20-minute nap ends just as the caffeine kicks in and clears the brain of a molecule called adenosine, maximizing alertness. “Adenosine is a byproduct of wakefulness and activity,” says Allen Towfigh, MD, medical director of New York Neurology & Sleep Medicine. “As adenosine levels increase, we become more fatigued. Napping clears out the adenosine and, when combined with caffeine, an adenosine-blocker, further reduces its effects and amplifies the effects of the nap.”

Tech giants are jumping into the fray with fitness offerings like Apple Health and Google Fit, but there’s still not much in the way of, well, actual medicine. The Fitbits and Jawbones of the world measure users’ steps and heart rate, but they don’t get into the deep diagnostics of, say, biomarkers, the internal indicators that can serve as an early warning sign of a serious ailment. For now, those who want to screen for a disease or measure a medical condition with clinical accuracy still need to go to the doctor.

Dr. Eugene Chan and his colleagues at the DNA Medical Institute (DMI) aim to change that. Chan’s team has created a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. Known as rHEALTH, the technology was developed over the course of seven years with grants from NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On Monday, the team received yet another nod (and more funding) as the winners of this year’s Nokia Sensing XChallenge, one of several competitions run by the moonshot-seeking XPrize Foundation.

The goal of the XChallenge is to accelerate innovation in sensor technologies that address healthcare problems. Teams came up with tools intended to quickly and easily allow individuals to detect possible health problems without having to rely on analysis from large, facility-bound lab instruments. First hatched by DMI in response to a NASA challenge to create a diagnostics device that could work even in space, rHEALTH was portable from the beginning.

“There used to be no method for good, autonomous diagnosis,” Chan tells WIRED. “rHEALTH technology is highly sensitive, quantitative, and capable of meeting the FDA’s bar for sophistication, while still being geared for consumers.”

Blood to Bluetooth

Here’s how it works: One small drop of blood is dropped into a small receptacle, where nanostrips and reagents react to the blood’s contents. The whole cocktail then goes through a spiral micro-mixer and is streamed past lasers that use variations in light intensity and scattering to come up with a diagnosis, from flu to a more serious illness such as pneumonia—or even Ebola—within a few minutes. There’s also a vitals patch that users can wear to get continuous health readings—EKG, heart rate, body temperature—delivered to their smartphone or the rHEALTH device itself via a Bluetooth link. An app called CHAS (Comprehensive Health Assessment Unit) can walk the user through the process of self-diagnosis.

The real innovation of rHEALTH, according to Chan, is in getting all the diagnostics technologies packed together into one handheld device. By shrinking its components so much compared to traditional devices, Chan says, patients will need to give 1,500 times less blood than they would for regular tests. Since it was originally developed for NASA, the device has even been tested in simulated lunar and zero gravity. “It’s a symphony of innovations, but we’ve pushed all of them individually to create the device,” Chan says.

THE HOPE IS THAT PEOPLE WILL USE THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE MEANINGFUL LIFESTYLE CHANGES BASED ON REAL, ROBUST MEDICAL DATA.

Right now, rHEALTH is reliable for cell counts, HIV detection, vitamin D levels, and various protein markers in the body. The next challenges, according to Chan, are adding more tests, scaling up production, and going through the laborious process of getting the rHEALTH commercialized. The company is manufacturing three different models: the rHEALTH One, which will be used for translational research; the rHEALTH X, meant to be used as a kind of power tool for clinicians; and the rHEALTH X1, which will be available for consumers.

Since the rHEALTH One must only be vetted by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) before being used in research—it doesn’t have to meet stringent FDA standards it will need to reach before being marketing to physicians and consumers—Chan says DMI can ship units in a matter of weeks to interested scientists. Chan’s team will learn from how it’s utilized in research settings to make improvements.

Making Real Changes

It could be a while before consumers actually get access to rHEALTH. In the meantime, the next challenge for Chan and his team is to prepare for the bigger, $10 million challenge from the XPrize Foundation, the Tricorder XPRIZE, which the Nokia Sensing XChallenge was set up to feed. The goal is to create a universal, Star Trek-inspired medical diagnostic tool that detects up to 16 separate health conditions. Of the 11 teams included in the Sensing XChallenge, only DMI is also a Tricorder finalist.

When rHEALTH finally does become available to consumers, Chan says the hope is that people will use the technology to make meaningful lifestyle changes based on the real, robust medical data from the device—a step beyond what he sees as the typical fitness tracker.

“It’s interesting to see how people interact with wearables,” says Chan. “A lot of them think of them as toys or gadgets. That’s not what rHEALTH is. It’s really meant to help you take care of yourself when you’ve got a serious health condition.”